The Art of Fiction No. 30
“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.”
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh was an English novelist and biographer known for his depictions of English high society. Born in 1903, Waugh was educated at Hertford College, Oxford, a setting that would feature prominently in his work. In 1930, he converted to Catholicism. While he had written mostly satire in his early career, his most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was his first to consider Catholic themes. After serving in World War II, Waugh released the somewhat autobiographical Sword of Honour trilogy, the first installment of which, Men at Arms (1952), received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952. Waugh died of heart failure in 1966.
Photo by Carl Van Vechten, Wikimedia Commons